Claiming and Contesting Postcolonial Citizenship. Fifty years of political struggles over the rights and belonging of Surinamese-Dutch families

Researcher: Eline Westra

Eline’s PhD research project looks into five decades of political debates over the rights and belonging of Surinamese-Dutch citizens in the Netherlands, from the 1970s to the present. Her dissertation explores citizenship from various angles: legal citizenship (migration rights and illegalization), social citizenship (pension rights) and intimate citizenship (how gender and ideas on ‘the family’ come in). She has analyzed both state perspectives and activist political claims-making: the contributions of Surinamese-Dutch citizens themselves to debates on postcolonial citizenship. Click here for an overview of her publications so far.